


time keeping

by bebitched



Category: Twilight
Genre: F/M, Future Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-08
Updated: 2012-07-08
Packaged: 2017-12-03 04:02:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/693879
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bebitched/pseuds/bebitched
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>you feel like you’ve taken your mother’s place in the pack, slid right into the empty place she left behind, the seat still warm with her human heat. <i>the vampire girl. </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	time keeping

**Author's Note:**

> i've always wanted to write an epic-length piece where nessie goes traveling around the world trying to define family and home, and spends time with the pack and the volturri and the other vamp hybrids in south america... but that's never going to happen, so have this instead!

 

 

_time [tahym] noun: duration regarded as belonging to the present life as distinct from the life to come or from eternity; finite duration._

Your wedding is relatively drama-free, at least compared to what you’ve heard of your parents’ nuptials.

You marry in the winter, beneath an old oak tree that you’d hung a swing from as a child. (Charlie is the only human there to grumble about the cold.) The ceremony is short and sweet, traditional where nothing else about the event could be, and the witnesses fill two very distinct sides: bride and groom. Your half is pale statues, shades of tawny and crimson eyes, snow dusting skin as if the flakes were falling on stone. But Jacob’s half is clunky and boisterous, russet skinned, overflowing from their seats and whooping when he kisses you after the vows. (Even the wolves from Sam’s pack wish the both of you well at the reception.)

The two packs have come to an agreement, mended fences. Not joined together again, but living in harmony. In-laws, almost. Emily’s kitchen becomes home base again, and you finally get to taste her famous blueberry muffins for yourself.

You feel like you’ve taken your mother’s place in the pack, slid right into the empty place she left behind, the seat still warm with her human heat. _The vampire girl_. You’d like to think that the other wolves like you more, that they recognize the vampire part wasn’t exactly your choice. That they regret that the split of the pack was over your annihilation, and your mother’s. But you’re not naïve, can hear them whisper about how fucked up the whole situation is (you’ve never told them your hearing is nearly as good as a full-vampire’s). Emily smiles at you kindly, though, as they gossip like hens in a coop, and you wonder what she thinks of you, without the wolf instinct to kill your family and being married to the head of the (former) death squad.

She doesn’t flinch when you play with her children the way the others too, and she laughs right along with you when you tickle them until they can’t breathe. This is a gift you can’t even begin to thank her for; the news of your infertility still stings, still makes you regret that Jacob couldn’t have married someone normal, someone that could give him babies. When Sam looks at you like you aren’t fit to be around children… it hurts you something awful, more than you would admit.

You bond with Leah, surprisingly, not just because of your shared barrenness, but because if there’s one person’s existence that Sam regrets more than yours, it’s hers. She tells you to appreciate the gift you’ve been given, that you owe imprinting as much for your happiness as she owes it for her sadness. But sometimes you wonder if it’s truly you that this mystical force has endowed with contentment, and not your mother’s peace of mind, or Jacob’s broken heart, or your father’s guilty conscience. (You won’t ever tell Leah this, of course. She’d bite your head off, call you ungrateful.)

Even still, the chair opposite Emily’s beside the stove becomes your second home while Jacob is out patrolling. (You live in fear that the Volturri will return, have nightmares that they will sneak up and snap his neck before you ever even had a chance to stop them. Only your father knows what wakes you up at night, and you’ve sworn him to secrecy.) You could help them, one more set of eyes and ears, but your human half takes precedence in Jacob’s mind when it comes to matters of safety, so you are regaled to the spot next to Kim and eventually Claire, asking if there’s any more sugar for your tea.

Life in that kitchen is nothing but bated breath, nervous glances at the clock when it begins to grow dark. They live in a constant state of awareness that the sudden appearance of a hostile Cold One could mean death at any moment, that at any given second their husbands could be dead and they just don’t know it yet.

You always contrast this with your father’s family in your mind.

The Cullen family home bears no clocks beyond those on fancy cell phones, the walls covered with relics from the past instead of the future. Because this is what you’ve discovered about your parents’ kind:

Time means about as much to vampires as it does to a rock. Past, present, future; it’s all relatively the same thing.

Humans don’t really acknowledge it, but their sense of time comes from change within their body. Blood pumps steadily, skin cells slough off, the stomach digests and hair grows. You’d read once that time was nothing but a unit of change; this is why vampires felt time differently, almost as if it was flying by while simultaneously never moving at all.

In times of crisis, where Emily and Kim would be twitching and pacing, it finds the Cullen women stock still, frozen in their dread, unable or unwilling to keep up their human charade. The most movement in a room full of panicked Cullens lies in Alice’s eyes scanning back and forth like a metronome, searching the future, or your father’s clenching fists, or your mother’s bit lip.

It’s as if stress makes vampires unable to pretend to be human, and humans unable to pretend to be anything else.

The next day is daylight savings, and the wall clock in your and Jacob’s kitchen ticks away above the stove, unknowing that it’s steady, unquestionable beat will be wrong in a matter of hours. You’d always thought the whole concept was silly; if time were real, wouldn’t it always be right? Jumping forward or back seemed to reveal that it was merely an illusion, tugging the curtain back to reveal the man behind it puling all the strings. In truth, you’d struggled to understand the need for time at all, a product of your vampire half’s immortality. But it’s a human construct and, like others, you’ve grown to accept it, living in a human world as you do.

The screen door creaks as Jacob arrives home from another patrol with Leah, and you sigh, letting the worries melt from your shoulders.

In the morning you’ll turn back the clocks and pretend it matters to you, that taking care over tiny hands will make you human, because even though you never will be, it’s far easier to pretend than to admit what you know:

You do not belong.

  



End file.
